... for Broadway director Bartlett Sher, who spent his 'very, very important formative years' working in San Diego

By James Hebert THEATER CRITIC

July 13, 2008

The New York Times

Bartlett Sher has vaulted to the top of Broadway with shows like the
Tony-winning “South Pacific,” but the director got his start doing
“crazy little stuff” here in the 1980s.

NEW YORK – Bartlett Sher is huddled under the eaves of Manhattan's Lincoln Center on a mid-June afternoon, contemplating two phenomena he didn't see much of during his theater days in San Diego: Rain pouring from a thundery sky, and large crowds pouring from one of his plays.

In barely 24 hours, Sher will be on national TV before some 6 million viewers, accepting a best-director Tony Award for his Broadway revival of “South Pacific.”

But on this soggy Saturday, few of the people spilling happily from a matinee of the hit musical at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre seem to recognize the director, who's only there by coincidence (he had been picking up his wife's Tony-night dress nearby).

“How did it go?,” he asks with a bemused smile, when one showgoer stops by to say hello.

For Sher, things are going very well these days. His directing award was one of seven Tonys earned by “South Pacific,” the most for any show this year. This was also Sher's third trip to the Tonys in four years; he received a directing nomination in 2005 for the musical “The Light in the Piazza” (which won six Tonys) and another in 2006 for the play “Awake and Sing!” (which earned two).

On the surface, Sher's burgeoning Broadway fame seems a world removed from the start of his career in San Diego some 20 years ago, when he was waiting tables while working at theaters all over town and staging his own, decidedly non-mainstream productions.

But Sher sees a direct line between the “crazy little stuff” he created during his eight years or so here – experimental, often politically charged work staged in bare warehouses or on city streets – and the mainstream works he's most known for now.

ENTERCAPTIONHERE

Those were “the very, very important formative years” in his career, Sher says, “in a really great environment. San Diego was a great place to work, because there was a lot of stuff to do. There were so many things to learn.”

He first came here from San Francisco in 1983 to set up and run a new company, San Diego Public Theatre, at the request of Robyn Hunt, who had been his professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

As he settled in, Sher also began working with Sushi Gallery (now Sushi Performance & Visual Art) as its technical director. At that groundbreaking downtown arts hub, founded by Lynn Schuette, Sher met such artists as Joe Chaikin and Eric Bogosian and Whoopi Goldberg, who was then just getting her start at Sushi and San Diego Rep.

(Fittingly enough, Goldberg hosted the Tony Awards this year.)

“I was actually working almost five jobs at once, because I would teach (at San Diego State), I'd be at Sushi, I'd be running the San Diego Public, I'd be working at a restaurant,” recalls Sher.

“I work too hard in general. I do that now – they just happen to be paying me for theater now.”

Sher actually turned down his first offer for a professional job from an outside company: That of directing “A Christmas Carol” at San Diego Rep.

“It was great of them to ask, and I like Sam (Woodhouse, the Rep's artistic director) and Doug (Jacobs, the theater's co-founder) as well,” he says. “They were really great to me, and continue to be. I just thought, I'm not the right person – it won't be any good.”

Instead, he made his professional debut as a dramaturge on Brecht's “A Man's a Man” at La Jolla Playhouse, directed by Robert Woodruff, who was to become an important mentor.

For much of that time, Sher lived in a small apartment above the old Blue Door bookstore on Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. His housemate and longtime partner in life and art was Carla Kirkwood, whom Sher calls “one of the great theater, social and intellectual minds I've ever known.”

Kirkwood, who today is the faculty coordinator for the Center for International Studies Program at Southwestern College, helped introduce Sher to theater from China and other cultures. Together, the two put forth a series of inventive and edgy theatrical happenings.

“San Diego was always incredibly homogenous,” with its major civic institutions working hand in glove, Kirkwood says. “Finding cracks was very difficult. But we were able to find wedges.

“We were playing with things that were probably bigger than us. But we were politically critical of things around us. That was scary and exciting.”

Hitting the streets

Two pieces in 1989 exemplified that sense of theatrical adventure and social consciousness.

“Woycezk and Maria on East 94,” commissioned by Sushi, was a riff on Brecht's “Woycezk,” performed on the loading dock and surrounding streets of the former Carnation milk factory downtown (in what is now the Ballpark District). The piece featured electronic effects and honking, screeching cars, and used freeway violence as a jumping-off point to explore underlying troubles.

Pieces like that, says Lynn Schuette, were very much in tune with her progressive-minded company.

“Sushi was really the place in town to develop that angle,” Schuette says. “That was really important, that (Sher) brought that to Sushi.”

“Welcome Back, Emma,” which came later that year, was a roving performance piece that had Kirkwood playing the late Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who was run out of town in 1912 during labor and free-speech strife in San Diego.

Kirkwood arrived at the Santa Fe Depot on an Amtrak train as a parade of performers portraying historical figures and contemporary city officials marched to meet her. The free-form event, masterminded by Sher's Plus Fire Performance Group (founded after the Public Theatre closed) and created with UCSD artists David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco and Louis Hock, wound up getting spontaneous assistance from people along the way.

“Homeless people started getting up and talking about what it was like living on the streets, how they'd been abandoned by the government,” Kirkwood recalls. “A lot of them were veterans.”

Sher recalls the piece and the uproar over it (including a tiff with the then-San Diego Union over an ad for the event that the paper refused to run) as “completely mad and fantastic.”

“I was really much more experimental in my tastes in those days,” he says. “And that was a good time to do all that. I was exploring all kinds of different stuff.”

Kirkwood says such ambitious productions were “a tremendous amount of work. But in addition to being a great director and great friend, I see Bart work very hard to this day. There was nothing that anyone gave to him.”

Though in person he comes across as laid-back and unassuming, Sher is known as a committed and sometimes demanding director. In San Diego, that passion and fire seemingly came through even when he was working at the now-defunct French cafe Piret's.

“I was really, really not a good person to wait on tables,” Sher says with a laugh. “I could not control my mouth. When someone was not OK, or they were really treating a person badly, my bizarre sense of justice emerged.”

He tells one story about drawing a line through the tip section of a check before handing it back to a particularly obnoxious customer.

“The guy said, 'What's wrong?' And I said, 'You could not possibly give me any money that I would ever want.' I just thought it was unbelievably terrible that he thought he could pay enough money and then treat people like that. So I took away his opportunity to make me feel any worse.”

Onward and upward

When Sher finally left San Diego in the early 1990s, it was not to flee hostile diners but to take a job at the renowned Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Since 2000, he has been artistic director at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle.

Partly because of Sher's growing mainstream success, Kirkwood says, “I think people sometimes see him as inauthentic. He has relocated into a situation that requires more compromise than he had to make before. At the same time, I think he's still driven by a certain kind of sensibility in what he does.”

Kirkwood recalls sensing early on that fame had some appeal to Sher, although “I think all of us have some of that. I don't think that's a bad thing. And I never saw Bart step on anyone to get what he wanted. I don't think it ever pre-empted a value system that was about human beings.”

Two decades later, those principles manifest in a very character-oriented adaptation of “South Pacific.”

Though the Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, which hadn't been revived on Broadway since its initial run in 1949, has had a reputation as a theatrical lightweight (partly due to the 1958 movie version), Sher saw its political resonance from the start.

The story centers on Ensign Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse stationed on a remote Pacific island during World War II; she falls in love with a local French plantation owner, but has a crisis of conscience after learning he has two mixed-race children.

Her struggles unfold against a backdrop of war and personal sacrifice, though the musical's lush, often upbeat score (performed by a 30-piece orchestra) tends to soften the play's more sobering elements.

“Anybody who knew me in San Diego knows that the political moment is important to me in anything,” Sher said.

“And it's small-p political. I do think that every piece has its immediate significance. So I would be looking for that, and I would be attracted to 'South Pacific' because it was unwavering in its looking at racism and looking at our families and what they meant.”

Kelli O'Hara, Tony-nominated for playing Nellie, says Sher's adaptation – for which he consulted the creators' original script – succeeds in large part “because he tells the truth. He goes to the source. He doesn't start with any flashy dancing or transitions. He starts with the book, the truth of it.”

Lighting designer Donald Holder, a multiple Tony-winner who added another for his work on “South Pacific,” adds that Sher's directing style encouraged a spirit of deep collaboration.

“He's very trusting,” Holder said, shortly after receiving his award. “He doesn't micromanage. He's a great leader, and he'll tell you what he thinks – he's not afraid to express his opinion. But he's also experienced enough to know he has to give us a little bit of time to develop our ideas.”

Though “Piazza” and “Awake and Sing!” gave Sher an initial taste of Broadway acclaim, the reaction to his new musical has been in a different key entirely.

“What happened with 'South Pacific' is not like anything that's ever happened in my life,” Sher says. “It's a very, very big experience. Those other projects were incredibly close to my heart, and I love them equally. And maybe more – I don't want to judge it that way.

“But the thing about 'South Pacific,' it's coming at some sort of cultural point where this musical, with all its talking about us as a country in 1949, and now – (Rodgers and Hammerstein) really did write a story about how we can change, how we could be better.”

Though the grand stage of Broadway seems a likely place to host more of Sher's work, it's not a place where he ever would have wanted to start.

“When I talk to young directors, especially in New York, one of the first things I say is, get out of New York,” he says. “Go somewhere, no matter where it is, and build up your work for five or six years. And then see where you are.”

It worked for Sher, and two decades after his stint in San Diego, the whole theater world is getting a chance to see where he is.